


Liberty of the Press

by AMarguerite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: 1830 revolution, Gen, history of the book, printer!Enjolras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 00:48:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13306863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: Enjolras experiences the first day of the July 1830 Revolution.





	Liberty of the Press

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PilferingApples](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PilferingApples/gifts).



On July 26th, Enjolras woke to the noise of men, angry men, in the printshop below his room. He swam to consciousness. It was a hot day in late July; the window near his bed window was still open, to let in what little breeze there was. Talk spilled over and into it in a rising crescendo, and yet-- he frowned. It was only a little past sunrise. No one should be awake yet, save the charwomen and some of the maids, getting breakfast ready for the apprentices.

Enjolras raised his head from the pillow and pushed his golden hair from his eyes. Out in the yard, paper hung to dry fluttered in the breeze like banners. Boys were already running through it; there were half-dressed apprentices in the yard, heads bent together over something, and a pressman from _Le Nationale_ was drinking coffee with the shop foreman.

A knock at the door.

“Nephew?”

There was something wrong. Uncle Jules ought not to be up at this hour. He was the _patron,_  the head of the printing house. He should be the last to rise. Enjolras looked away from the window to the door. “Yes?”

Uncle Jules gently pushed the door open. He was a tall,thin man, as pale and fair as all the family tended to be. In his nightshirt, with his long hair (which he still wore in an old-fashioned queue) loose about his shoulders, and a newspaper in his hand, he looked like an elongated version of their printer’s mark of a scroll-bearing angel. He quietly shut the door behind him and locked it before handing over the paper.

“Some of our colleagues at _Le Moniteur_ sent this over as soon as they set the type.”

Enjolras sat up in his bed and took the paper, with the fuzzy idea that he was supposed to be checking the proofs. Uncle Jules sat on the edge of his bed, looking anxious and unhappy.

At first, Enjolras read for misspelt words, and skimmed the paper. Then the words sank in. They gained meaning; they ceased to be rows of letters. He paused and returned his gaze to the top of the page. It was the work of no more than half-a-minute. A lifetime spent within the printshop meant he read even more quickly than his friend Combeferre. “Freedom of the press has been suspended?”

“Yes,” said Uncle Jules. “We are effectively out of business. Read on. Half of Paris is out of business now, not merely the printers.”

Enjolras began to frown as he read. Then, feeling suddenly alert, he dashed out of bed and strode over to his dressing table. “This cannot be allowed to stand. We cannot accept the death of our entire industry.”

“No,” said Uncle Jules. “This is so stupid a set of orders, I cannot entirely believe they will remain law. I am going to dress and go to St. Cloud with the Didots, and anyone else we can get.”

Enjolras splashed water on his face-- he somehow still could not grow a beard, which sometimes annoyed him-- and toweled himself dry. He turned to look at his uncle. “Do you really think that will do any good?”

His uncle sighed and looked suddenly, terribly old. “No. I do not think so. But we must try.”

Enjolras felt, in the air, a faint stirr of breeze. The fine fair hair lifted off the back of his neck and he thought, ‘That will do no good, and my uncle knows it.” 

“Once you are dressed, come downstairs,” said Uncle Jules, rising. “The apprentices are already up, and frightening each other. The gamins are all running about; I daresay in half-an-hour every printshop in Paris will know that the king wishes to destroy our industry entirely. I need you to show the men that we are committed to preserving their jobs and their families, however we must.” Uncle Jules glanced at the hunting rifle leaning in the corner, left out from when Enjolras had gone on away for a shooting party, earlier that summer, to one of Courfeyrac’s family estates. Then, after a moment, he said, “Matters move swiftly in Paris. If you feel you need to act before I return, do so.”

 

***

 

Uncle Jules, dressed in his best, had taken the carriage to St. Cloud, and Enjolras, dressed in shirtsleeves, trousers, and printer’s apron, remained. Through the gamins, and the appearance of pressmen turned off from their newspapers, news kept washing in, like wreckage on a shore: the _Journal des débats_ had ceased publication; _Le Moniteur_ had ceased publication; _Le Constitutionnel_ had ceased publication; heads of newspapers and printshops were meeting somewhere-- at a cafe, no at _Le Nationale-_ \- to protest. No, to sign a petition. Factories were being shuttered, as their owners were protesting the ordinance banning them from voting. The workers were out on the streets, out of work, out of patience.  

Uncle Jules returned.

Enjolras raised his eyes from the line of type he was setting and met his uncle’s eyes.

Uncle Jules took off his top hat and shook his head.

The printshop erupted into a cacophony of overlapping protests, the pressmen halting in their tasks and letting the presses drop with juddering clangs, the compositors jumping up from their tables, dropping their sticks, spilling type everywhere. The women and boys hanging sheets to dry in the yard came in; and the women trimming paper and sewing the gathered sheets together clustered in the doorway to the main room. All was chaos.

Enjolras swam through the mass of people, towards his uncle, and laid a hand on his arm. He had never seen Uncle Jules look quite so old.

“Ah, young Master Enjolras,” he said, wearily clasping him on the shoulder. “You never thought, when your father sent you to Paris, that you would not be able to carry on the work of your ancestors did you?” 

“I do not believe that you are the last Enjolras to run this shop,” said Enjolras quietly. “There is a meeting at the offices of _Le Nationale._ ” 

“Ah,” said Uncle Jules. “Much good it will do.”

“It will do something,” said Enjolras. “The people can only be pushed so far before they push back.”

The foreman banged the wooden pole he used to raise and lower sheets to the drying lines against a metal case of type. “Quiet! Monsieur le patron has something to say!” 

Uncle Jules gripped tightly onto Enjolras’s shoulder and turned to face the rest of the shop, “I was unable to obtain an audience with the king, but we have proofs already approved by the censors. We shall set them and print them. We shall not fail in our work.”

“But Monsieur,” cried one of the compositors, “if there is no liberty of the press, if all the newspapers are to stop in their work-- then does it matter if the censors have already approved? Surely we will be banned from selling our work.”

“I do not know,” said Uncle Jules. “I am going to the meeting at _Le Nationale_ , to see what will be done. I know--” raising his free hand for silence “--I _know_ this is not the news you wish to hear. I know what these ordinances mean. It is my opinion that a government such as this cannot demand obedience. No king can demand the death of an industry that has advanced France since the sixteenth century. If you feel it your duty to resist, as I do, then let it take any form you feel right. I will pay you all for this day, however it is used.”

Enjolras felt the news swirling about him, felt the undertow of revolution pulling at him. He watched the workers of the print shop, talking to each other in low voices, and thought, 'Soon.'

 

***

 

That evening some of the newspaper reporters now out of work came to the print shop. Enjolras watched them enter, and go straight back to his uncle's glass-enclosed office in the back.

They were soon followed by policemen.

“This is the Enjolras printshop?” asked one of the policemen.

Enjolras was leaning against one of the handpresses, half-hanging over the wooden lever, reading a copy of the collective protest roughly fifty journalists had signed against the Ordinances. He looked up.

The foreman, who was helping with the huge, heavy, cast-iron Stanhope Press in the center of the room, grunted out, “You entered the shop with the sign of the angel, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s the Enjolras print shop.”

“We have been told,” said the policeman, his compatriots clustering behind him, “that you are harboring contraband.”

The foreman turned and looked at them. “Contraband? We are a print shop, gentlemen, a print shop. Not a newspaper. We print books, pamphlets, posters, cards. Books that have been approved by the censors.”

“Fetch Enjolras.”

The foreman folded his arms. “What right have you to come in here and disturb our business?”

“Divine right,” snapped the policeman. “The right of those obeying the ordinances of the king.”

The foreman spit on the floor. “That for the divine right of kings!”

The policeman took out his truncheon and suddenly hit the foreman in the stomach.

The foreman fell over with a grunt of pain.

The printshop went suddenly silent. Enjolras always forgot how noisy a printshop was-- the jokes flying through the air, the continual clack of type, the sound of presses being raised and lowered, the continual low rustle of paper-- and now? Nothing.

“Now, my good man,” said the policeman, pleasantly enough, “we are going to search this shop for contraband. You are going to fetch us Enjolras.”

Enjolras had felt the undertow of revolution swirling about him all day, now felt it drawing him up like the crest of a wave. He wrenched out the heavy wooden bar used to raise and lower the handpresses, and in the two seconds it took him to walk from his handpress to the center of the room, took in the sight of all the journeymen printers and apprentices staring at the police, at the unemployed workers outside the large plate glass windows at the front of the shop, staring through the open door, and saw them pulled as he was. 

He held his bar like a singlestick and stepped before the fallen foreman. 

“I,” he said, “am Enjolras.”

The policeman looked incredulous. “You? You are Enjolras?”

“I am.” He met the policeman’s eye. “You will leave this shop. There is nothing here for you.”

“Search the place,” said the policeman.

“This is private property, and you are impeding these men in their work,” said Enjolras. “Remove yourself, or I will be forced to remove you.”

The policeman looked incredulous and stepped forward.

Enjolras swung his lever up and knocked the baton out of the policeman’s hand. Then the policeman charged. Enjolras jammed the end of his lever into the policeman’s stomach. The other policemen flung themselves at Enjolras; they in turn, were mobbed by furious journeymen. The printers had been on edge already, had been on edge all day; the tidal wave had gathered, now it crested.

“A bas les Bourbons!” came the furious cry, and they flooded into the streets.


End file.
